Statement of Goals and Choices

In this final unit, you have a lot of flexibility to determine the goals, audience, and medium for your project. It is very important that you think thoughtfully about why you are choosing the avenue you do, and be aware of what specific composition choices you are making in the process of your project. With that in mind, it is important that you catalogue these choices carefully at the outset so that you have an idea of how your project grew, shifted, changed, morphed, and evolved over time. This is a time for you to explain to me what worked and what didn’t, what technological issues you may have encountered, and how did these impact your decisions and the outcome of your final project? Explain in detail your process of devising and developing this project in more depth and why you selected the argument and medium you did.

The purpose of the SOGC is to clarify for your reader your intentions for the project and the specific choices that you have made to best reach your audience and achieve your goals. An SOGC is a time for you to provide a defense of your work, and these are weighted heavily when considering the “success” of your project. The reason for this is that one of the primary goals of the course is to ensure that you are able to thoughtfully defend the rhetorical choices you make and show how those choices are aligned with your purpose and audience. Success in writing requires writers to reflect on these choices and then be able to articulate them. Regardless of what medium you choose to work in, you must complete an SOGC and it will comprise of 40% of your final Unit 3 grade. You can think of this as a longer, more detailed, structured, and polished Writer’s Memo.

Your SOGC should be roughly 4-5 pages. You need to take the time to articulate your decisions and draw my attention to the work that you have done with the project you are presenting. You will detail how, why, and under what conditions you used to make this particular textual, rhetorical, technological, and methodological choices in your project. These statements will also provide me with a way of navigating and responding to the projects that you make if I am unfamiliar with the medium you chose. Consider all of the theoretical and practical readings that we have covered this semester when reflecting on your work. Follow MLA format for your paper.

Successful SOGCs will address the following questions:

Describe your goals for this project. What, specifically, is this piece trying to accomplish—above and beyond satisfying the minimum requirements outlined in the project description? What work does this piece do? For whom? In what contexts? For what audiences? Where did you observe this issue/problem, how did you get inspired to create this project? Who is this project aimed toward? What is the project asking the audience to do, what are you hoping to achieve in this project, what actions do you hope the audience will make as a result of this project? What are your plans for sharing this with the target audience or other interested parties?

What specific rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices did you make in the service of accomplishing the goal(s) articulated above? What moments of glitch or failure caused you to rethink and revise your plan of action? Catalog, as well, choices that you might not have consciously made during the making—those that were made for you when you opted to work with certain genres, materials, and technologies.

Why did you end up pursuing this plan as opposed to other project proposals you considered? How did the various choices listed above allow you to accomplish things that other sets or combinations of choices would not have?

What writing skills did you use during the course of this project? What can you do better now than you could do before? How has your thinking about writing changed or grown during the course of this project?

Detail all the actors, human and non-human, that played a role in helping you to accomplish this task. What did your process look, feel, sound, or smell like? List the technologies (iMovie, prezi, audio programs, web platforms, etc.) time, money, tools, and people you utilized in order to construct your project. Please think of this as a kind of list of credits featured at the end of movies. Consider who and what helped you achieve your goals.

Please organize your writing thoughtfully and carefully while attending to these questions in your reflection and discussion. You should not simply respond to these questions one by one, but rather you can think of this as your opportunity to tell the narrative of your research, reflection, and composition of the project.

Please note that this assignment is adapted from Jody Shipka’s A Composition Made Whole pg. 110-129. In addition, many of the ideas here have been borrowed from Anna Floch Arcello and Annika Konrad.